Next week I’ll be attending The MarTech Summit Madrid, taking place on 19 May 2026 at VP Plaza España Design. And, judging by the agenda, it looks like exactly the kind of event Marketing Operations needs right now: Less theoretical hand-waving, more practical conversation about how marketing teams are actually dealing with AI, data, customer experience, automation, sales alignment, and trust.

If AI is already being used inside your Marketing Operations function, now is the time to understand where the risk sits.

The real nightmare is what happens when AI stops being a clever assistant and starts becoming an operator. When it can access systems. Query databases. Change records. Trigger workflows. Sync audiences. Update fields. Delete things. Move people between lifecycle stages. Send campaigns. Alter routing. Touch customer data. At that point, AI is no longer just helping your team think. It is acting inside the machinery of your business.

The AI companies aren't incentivised to surface it - their models work by being confident, not by presenting uncertainty. The incumbent platforms aren't going to complain - they're the beneficiaries. So the responsibility falls on the people making the actual decisions.

The goal is to reach the right people, at the right companies, with the right message, at the right moment. That is where Demandbase and LinkedIn become a very useful combination. And, more importantly, that is where ABM starts to look less like a theory and more like a working growth engine.

AI usage is widespread, data is flowing into tools that aren't governed, and nobody has had the conversation yet. It's working fine. Until it isn't.

The hard part was never the connection. It's making AI work reliably inside your specific operations - with your conventions, your processes, your QA standards, and the institutional knowledge that no API exposes.

For our luxury holiday client, this wasn’t a “nice-to-have” optimisation project. It was an existential one. Email performance was flat. Marketo was under scrutiny. And the CEO had made it very clear: Prove the value of the platform and the team behind it in 2025, or both were gone.

Off-the-shelf LLMs make a great demo. Enterprise Marketing Ops needs something more deliberate.

SEO isn't dead. But it's no longer the only game that matters for discovery, and it's no longer where the most consequential first impressions are being formed. The shift from SEO to GEO isn't something to prepare for. It's something to respond to.

Claude connecting to Marketo may well become useful. In the right environment, with the right controls, it could genuinely help capable teams move faster without losing discipline. But that outcome will not belong to the teams who got excited first. It will belong to the teams who treated permissions seriously, kept approvals intact, demanded proper auditability, strengthened QA, respected production risk, and resisted the now very fashionable urge to mistake easy access for

When highly capable Marketing Operations teams are spending huge chunks of their week doing repetitive campaign checks, something has gone wrong in the operating model.

AI agents are multiplying inside the platforms MOPs teams already operate whether you know it or not, and nobody has built the operational layer to manage them.

At Sojourn Solutions, we implement, manage, and optimise marketing automation platforms for enterprise B2B organisations. This guide covers what marketing automation is, how it works in practice, what the major platforms are, and what it takes to run it well.

The next phase of AI value will not be defined by who can create the most content, automate the most tasks, or boast the loudest about “copilot” adoption. It will be defined by who can build a better operating model around it.

No ABM platform is magic. None of them can rescue poor process, vague ownership, or marketing teams that are still mistaking activity for progress. But platforms can make good teams better, or they can trap them inside expensive ambiguity. That is why the case for moving from 6sense to Demandbase is getting attention.

How do we help more of the right accounts become sales-ready in ways that look like deals we actually win? That question forces a more grown-up strategy. It pushes marketing closer to revenue. It exposes weak measurement. It sharpens targeting. It improves alignment with sales. And, perhaps most importantly, it stops teams mistaking form fills for progress.

If you are going to migrate to HubSpot, do it properly. Not perfectly. Properly. There is a difference. Perfect is theatre. Proper is structure, discipline and enough honesty to admit where the old setup was nonsense. That is not the glamorous version. It is, however, the version that works.

Online security standards have changed - as of February 24, 2026, Certificate Authorities (CAs) will issue public TLS/SSL certificates with a maximum validity of 199 days (previously 397 days). This is an industry-wide update driven by the latest CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, and it’s all about strengthening security across the web.

AI can speak for you. That is powerful. It is also a responsibility. Guardrails aren’t optional, not because you’re afraid of the tool, but because you respect what it means to speak under your name.